Abstract:

With the wide spread of the concept of scientific crowdsourcing, citizen science projects have risen rapidly, which promote the new paradigm of open science. From the perspective of scientific crowdsourcing, this paper divides citizen science projects into three types, and tries to figure out their task characteristics. Based on the fit related theories, the paper focuses on the four elements of task fit, including task, technology, organization, and individual. The four elements can be mapped to the task, intermediation platform, assigner and provider in the citizen science context. Furthermore, this paper proposes a taskdriven fit model in citizen science projects from three dimensions, namely taskintermediation platform fit, taskprovider fit and taskassigner fit. Due to the strong situational dependence of citizen science projects, different types of projects may differ in three fit dimensions. Therefore, we compare three kinds of citizen science projects, namely nonemergent, emergent with the quantitative accumulation, and emergent with the qualitative accumulation, which will yield some theoretical contribution and practical implication for platform development, task design and participants selection in citizen science projects.

Key words: Scientific crowdsourcing, Citizen science, Task fit model, Operation process, Task design